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Freed from the 22-minute temporal format of its former home on network television, where it was given the hatchet by Fox in 2006 after just three seasons, the ingeniously zany dysfunctional family sitcom is denser, loonier and, with most episodes clocking in between 30 and 35 minutes a pop — and here you should assume a terrible “Wee British” accent — a lot ’arder on the ol’ noggin than it has ever been.

In the best way possible, of course. But after 10 consecutive episodes on Sunday afternoon — or “#BluthDay,” as it quickly became known on Twitter amongst disciples of the Bluth family’s misfortunes — I started to feel like my brain was full, perhaps even on the verge of bubbling and emitting jets of steam. I gave it two more but could barely remember either as the credits rolled, so I pulled the plug at 12 new episodes and vowed to return after a long walk and a good night’s sleep.

Arrested Development
was dense before, but it’s
really
dense now, plotted with a backward-cycling, thread-crossing deviousness of which masters of narrative convolution like Martin Amis and Quentin Tarantino would be duly proud. It’s a lot to get your head around. It really is.

It lets its gags and its furious dialogue and its recurring tangents and its mindbending “meta”-ness breathe more than it used to, and therefore needs a little more room to breathe than it did before for its utter mastery of the sitcom format to properly be appreciated.

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Don’t worry, you’ll find no spoilers here. Suffice it to say that if you were on board with the increasingly offbeat tone that
Arrested Development
took when it was on its last legs at Fox, you’ll be pleased to witness the new series — which loosely focuses on a single Bluth parent or sibling (or the still obliviously gay Dr. Tobias Fünke) per episode to bring viewers up to speed on where they’ve all been since their saga was left dangling at an unsatisfactory close after some unpleasant business on the decks of the Queen Mary a few years ago — diving completely off the deep end here.

And I haven’t even made it to Buster’s “feature” episode yet, “Off the Hook.” That’s No. 14. That one frightens me.

There’s much to laugh at from the get-go, including some agonizingly dry early sequences in which a penniless and faintly delusional Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) cohabitates — and showers — with his pained son, George Michael (Toronto’s
Michael Cera
), in a cramped University of California dorm room.

Mother Lucille (Jessica Walter) is now the one in white-collar prison, while ex-con patriarch George (Jeffrey Tambor) is consuming hallucinogens with his brother Oscar and a “discredited anesthesiologist” named Dr. Norman in a desert sweat lodge.

Self-styled activist Lindsay Bluth (Portia de Rossi) is living on an ostrich farm with a hippie rabble-rouser she recently met at a barter restaurant described as “Salvation Army meets a soup kitchen meets a gastropub meets a Marxist- or Leninist-type social structure.”

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David Cross’s Tobias takes centre stage in “A New Start,” an episode that degenerates from his mistaking a methadone clinic for a method-acting class to truly gut-busting depths of screwball hilarity when he starts impersonating the Fantastic Four’s Thing on the street for money.

And perpetual loser brothers G.O.B. and Buster are … well, they’re G.O.B. (Will Arnett) and Buster (Tony Hale). It doesn’t go well for them. And, again, I haven’t made it to Buster’s feature episode yet. Same goes for whichever episode addresses the long-simmering romance between George Michael and his cousin-who-isn’t Maeby (Alia Shawkat).

And, without giving too much away, rest assured that you’ll find new recurring gags involving “ANUSTART” and “Halliburton Teen” as durable and lastingly amusing as “Analrapist” and the Bluth family banana stand.

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